Attracting Traffic with Banner Ads
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Nowshade_Kabir]Nowshade Kabir

Internet is an ever evolving business platform. Doing business on the Internet differs in a number of ways from every day brick and mortar business. Change here is more frequent, more dramatic
and may have greater impact than in a conventional business. Success in this climate can only come from quick response to the changes. Look at web advertisement! Just in a few short years, we have seen rise and fall of banner advertisement, email marketing, pop-ups, pop-unders and number of other marketing tools.

Consider banner advertisement. In the beginning of Internet era, banner advertisement was one of the primer methods of online marketing. There were not many quality sites in those days. In search of good feature and content filled websites visitors were clicking through banners aggressively. Today, things are totally different! Over using of banners on the web pages forced to train our eyes not to notice banners any more. Visitors tend to avoid clicking through the banners unless there is a very compelling reason to do so. Does that mean the banner advertisement is dead? Not so soon!

Although, banner click through rate is quite low in comparison
to what it used to be, depending on your objectives banner
advertisement can still be very effective. Banner ads are
used today, either for creating brand recognition or for
bringing in more traffic to the website and consequently
generating more sales.

Brand recognition

As an overall brand awareness campaign, companies place
banners on targeted websites.

Banners of products with mass appeal are frequently posted
on high traffic portals. If your goal is to make any of your
products or services popular to certain niche market, you
should find websites catering this particular audience and
post banner ads. When visitors see your banners, whether
they click on it or not – same like traditional bill boards
and TV advertisements – it helps you building consciousness
to your brand.

According to a recent study, online banner ads can be as
effective as television advertising as far as brand
recognition is concerned. A survey was conducted among
members of American Online who saw an ad of a product
as a banner on the website and on TV commercial. The
result indicated that 40 percent of the audience remembers
the static banners and 41 percent remembers the TV
commercial at the time of the poll conducted a few days
later.

Forester Research claims that you can get similar brand
recognition effect from online ad campaign in comparison
to traditional forms of advertisements for around 60
percent less cost. However, same like offline ads, in
order to create a sustainable brand recognition, your
online advertisement campaign also needs to run for a
prolong period of time.

Generating traffic

Banner ads could be a good source of high quality traffic
for your website if you manage your banner ad campaign
wisely. If your main purpose of the campaign is to generate
more sales by attracting traffic – which is any way should
be the main goal of any e-commerce site – you have to select
sites to post banners where you target audience frequently
visit. Pay per click search engines like Overture or Google
Adwords are good options for your textual banner ads. Since
the visitors are already looking for a website like yours
by searching for the keyword that you have selected to
place your ad, you get highly targeted traffic from this.

There are no fixed rules of effective banner ads campaign.
You have to learn the program works best for you by trial
and error. The principal idea behind any advertisement is
to grab viewers’ attention, ignite their curiosity and
motivate them to act. For banner ads it is no different!

The following tips should help you getting better result
from your banner advertisement campaign:

1. Choose an attention grabbing content. Space is so
limited in a banner – same like newspaper headlines – you
have to come up with something that really gets viewer’s
attention. Since you have to do it in one or two sentences,
try using something funny, outrageous but intriguing.
You can also use pictures, which deliver similar effect.

2. Call to an action. Many people like to be guided. Tell
them what to do such as “Click here” or “Go to the website”.

3. Focus on one offer. Your banner ad should carry one
single message. By including several offers in one ad,
chances are you will confuse viewers rather than intrigue.

4. Make it readable. Even a greatly designed banner will
fail to motivate a viewer if the text on it is not readable.

5. Avoid information overload. Too many pictures, colors
and texts make banners look clumsy. Viewers tend to ignore
this type of banners. Animated banners should have less than
four frames.

6. Don’t use heavy banners. Make sure that your banner file
size is less than 5K. Bigger files take longer time to load.

7. Test your banners before publishing. Check how your
banners will look with different browsers. Verify that the
banner link URL is correct and linked to the right page on
your website. Whenever, you make changes to your website,
make sure to double check your banner ads.

Recent practice shows that a banner, which looks like a text
has 4 times more click through rate than a conventional banner.
So use text banners to increase efficiency of your banner
ad program.

Since advertisement is the main source of income for many
websites banner ads are here to stay. Although, there is no
doubt that their look and use will constantly be evolved.

By Jason Hulott

With more and more experts and search engine enthusiasts claiming the right way and the wrong way to handle link swapping, link exchanging or reciprocal linking!

You can tell something is important when there is more than one name for it! GRIN!

There are also two schools of thought on the reasons link swapping.

The first reason for link swapping has always been to carry favour with Search engine rankings. Have a good site with lots of links and this is seen as a good thing and therefore Search Engines will rank you higher.

Sadly, like all things in life, this system can be abused and taken to the extreme. Sites are buying in hundreds if not thousands of links trying to “boost” their ranking artificially. This is fine in the short term but we are starting to see a fundamental shift in Search Engine algorithms.

My last article of link swapping , If Content is King, then surely relevance is Queen! explains my personal view of relevant linking which is still follow.

There is now a second and perhaps more disturbing reason for swapping links.

To build a useful link resource or directory for your visitors.

With working with similar themed sites, swap links to build a directory service which can share and drive traffic to sites within it. Some have even claimed this can drive more traffic that a Search engine ranking.

So how do I create this vision of loveliness.

Simple, build an on topic directory of your major site content.

There are a couple of great tools you can use to automate this process.

http://www.j2-squared.com/linking-101.htm

http://www.j2-squared.com/power-linking.htm

These tools will add new sections, manage your directory structure, and allow you to add links or even allow others to add their own links which you just approve.

This can all be run from a web browser so you can be swapping links sat on the beach or in fact from anywhere.

They are so simple to use you could get family to help out too! GRIN!

In terms of places to find links try:

www.linkpartners.com

as a good start point.

Remember, Search Engines change their algorithms all the time and you could fall out of favour at any time.

Your visitors are also getting more sophisticated and demanding at the same time. Give the visitor what they want first and let the search engine sort the rest out!

Good Luck!

By Dennis Francis

Many people set up websites and hold their breath for the thunderous traffic to reach them. After a few weeks of

loneliness, they contact their web designer to find out why no one has visited them. The usual answer is that it takes a while for the search engines to find you and index your pages.

What you never seem to hear is that the web designers are correct and wrong at the same time. The biggest mistake made by people who want to promote their business on the web is to do the promoting last.

If you are going to build a website that people are interested in, start by identifying your audience. a great way to do this is to blog. Setting up a blog takes a fraction of the time it takes to build a website and you can begin adding content immediately.

Blogging is a great free website promotion tool but it’s also a great way to test a market. You can ensure your efforts will not be wasted if you test your content and business model with a blog first.

Let’s say you had a plan for an online flea clothing business. You figure that pet owners who raise fleas will want to give them the best of everything. As a flea owner yourself, you know how happy your fleas are when they are warm and cozy.

Rather than start an online store, first get connected to the market. Create your blog, promote it and work your way up the search engines using article marketing. This will allow you to build readership and provide useful content for your website when you are finished.

If you can build traffic to your blog in a month, you know that you have a viable market. Create a few videos to promote the blog and offer to sign up subscribers to an email list. You can give them exclusive information on flea clothing and flea care before your website is finished.

If you take the effort to build your audience and build your online credibility, you will find it very easy to build traffic to your site once it is completed. You find it easier to increase website traffic and build targeted traffic to your

website once you are able to use blogging as a point man for your web project.

Internet traffic is not easy if you make it the last thing you do in site construction. You will need some measure of website optimization and promotion after you complete your site, but you will find it a whole lot easier if you establish a few blogs first to quickly establish your keyword SEO strategy.

This free website promotion strategy can make the difference between a costly failure and online success.

Let the total in your bank account spur you on to greater enthusiasm. Free web traffic is not really free; it can be costly if not executed consistently

By Sharif Aly

Technology makes our presence lively. So maintaining an online identity is a necessary thing in this biz-world. In this scenario, where everything has been made online, it’s essential for you to make the readers hooked up on your site. There are millions of pages that are available online and your site has to stand out from the rest. So what makes your site more unique? Is it your design; or the content which make your site attractive? Absolutely not! Of course your design should match with your prose. But beyond these aspects, there is a term called Traffic. So, how can it be done? Its quiet a meticulous thing that has to be done with at most care. To traffic a site is something tricky. This can be done in many ways. Every site owners follow their unique ways to traffic their site.

The most general way which is followed by many users is Site Engine optimization. Popularly termed as “SEO optimization”. Though it’s a common term, yet it can be done in numerous ways. Now a days, lot of soft wares are available in the market which can make this work done in minutes with just a few clicks.

We can summarize the methods which are adopted widely by the users around the world.

In order to make your site listed in popular Search Engines, you have to submit your site in the respective search engine portals (like Google, Yahoo, and MSN). This is a simple thing. But your job doesn’t end here. Its just a formal procedure. In fact it’s a laborious process and it takes lot of time for your site to get listed in top search engines. This way is called as Organic traffic.

The most widely used method is by introducing attractive advertisements in your site.

It can be done by placing an attracting add related to your web contents. There are lots of scripts available in market to enable this option. So it’s all about purchasing the apt one and placing in the right place in your site. In fact, this is the most efficient way to earn trough CPC (Cost per Click) concept.

You can customize Pop-up Ads in your site which will make the visitors more interested to click those, if it is something they are looking for.

Another way is to place Search engine bar in your site. This will avoid the chance of the users to switch over to a new window for search option. This can be customized with a script, so that your contents will be given more priority and gets a better page rank when the user search from the search box placed in your site. This will fetch you further traffic to your site.

Placing recent updates, and interesting news articles will make more traffic. There are numerous sites available which are providing news articles free of cost. So it’s easy for the users to customize the script in their site from the article providers.

Making more In-bound and On-bound linking mechanism fetch you a great way to make traffic.

We can make use of popular social networking portal like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut or Linked In, to familiarize your site. Also there are various “Ad pasting sites” which are available for this purpose. We can make use of these sites too. And make sure that, too much of traffic will lead to complications. As some Pop-up ads will annoy some users. So its is necessary to use a genuine method to traffic your site. Lot of reliable Soft wares is available in the market today. So get a genuine one and enjoy he maximum benefit or else go for organic traffic procedures.

By Mark A. Abrahams

In order to continuously stay on top of traffic building to your site, your website needs to be kept shiny and fresh, just like a new car.

Imagine sitting in a traffic jam, you just spent the entire day at work. You can’t wait to go home and find whatever the pleasure is that’s awaiting you. You look over and you see your dream car. For everyone it’s different, it’s that black, sexy sports car, that hugs the curves of the road. Or it might be that brand new gray pickup truck, that can tackle anything you put before it, mountains, sand-dunes, heaps of mud. Whatever it is it catches your attention and you’re hooked.

You want that same response when the “traffic jam” visitors, your desired web based traffic, comes to your site. They might be bored and doing a web search while waiting at a coffee shop, or they could have a received an e-mail from a friend telling them to look at your site. While wishing they were at home, waiting for their happiness after a long day, now, they’re focused and hooked on your site.

You drew them in through your well designed website, and you kept them looking through it as they’re engaged in reading your interesting articles. Perhaps you even introduced them to something they had not known they wanted, or needed, but they do now, because you know how to market. You keep them interested after they signed up for your promotional newsletter, and you make them keep wanting more, by not bombarding them everyday with offers.

They’re hooked on your site, because there was something about becoming a part of your site’s traffic that reminded them of that fine car that always keeps their attention.

By Vik Tailor

Lately, there have been a lot of heated discussions regarding link building. Is it ethical to create a link building campaign? Does Google or any other search engine penalize for “link farms” (a bunch of non-related links created for the SOLE purpose of increasing search engine ratings)? Is the “link building era” over?

Link Farms

Many webmasters claim that Google penalizes websites for link farms. If this is so, why are a link farm sites that have a page rank of 5 on their link farm page? Let me give you an example, go to Google.com, type in any popular keyword(s) and append the word “links” to it. For example, “ABCD Links.” Notice you’ll get tones of websites that are linking to unrelated sites, but still have a great PR. I do not encourage link farming in any way or form, but building valuable partnerships is something I do encourage. If you’re a jewelry site and you’re exchanging links with an antiques site, I think this is a great thing. It’s very possible that someone searching for jewelry may have an interest in antiques. I own a few sites and the hits I receive from partially related sites are phenomenal. Most of my websites are targeted towards webmasters so I receive hits from all sorts of sites. Remember, many webmasters claim to know the truth regarding search engine algorithms, but no one knows the EXACT TRUTH except the programmers at the search engines. Webmasters may have been penalized in the past for link farms and doorway pages (pages created around certain keywords for the sole purpose of redirecting surfers to the main page), but who’s to say why some HAVEN’T been penalized.

Who Should I Create Link Partnerships With?

1. Create link partnerships with sites related to your site.

2. Create link partnerships with sites that have an audience that may be interested in your products

3. Exchange homepage links with websites that fit in your genre. You’ll receive a link on a page with a good ranking and you’ll get quality, targeted hits.

How Do You Find Link Partners?

1. Signup with an automated links management provider that organizes your links and helps find link partners. Automated tools are the best because they help you save time. Uploading and downloading your pages for every link exchange can be a huge pain and very time consuming. Automated tools are NOT link farms because they give you complete control of who you exchange links with. If a member exchanges links with every website, he/she might be abusing the tool. If a member uses the tool responsibly, it can be very effective.

2. This is a great little exercise I would recommend to anyone.

a. Write down 20 search terms pertaining to your website

b. Go to http://www.google.com and type in a search term written in step A

c. Contact as many websites as possible listed under that search term and ask them to exchange inner page or homepage links with you. If they’re NOT interested, ask whether they would be interested in selling advertising space. If your website is fairly new, you may want to ask sites for advertising prices. Free hits are the best hits but sometimes you might have to go the extra lap and pay for service. I wouldn’t recommend spending over $100 / month for advertising UNLESS it’s a high traffic site with your site audience. The best deals are the ones that offer $10-25 / month. There are sites out there that will sell SUPER cheap advertising, and others that charge an arm and a leg.

EVERYONE gets rejected sometime or another so keep your head up and keep moving along! The internet is comprised of Billions of websites. If you’re rejected 500 times, you still have MANY business opportunities left! This is a continuous job so set aside time every week to do this. If you don’t have time for this, then you don’t have time to make money.

3. Hire a link building firm (this can be quite expensive but if you have money, its minimal work for you)

PageRank

Pagerank is a great tool but don’t use it as your ONLY measurement for success. I can’t explain everything about pagerank but a good explanation is given at http://www.google-watch.org/pagerank.html.

Conclusion

In conclusion, link building is not only for increasing link partners and search engine rankings, it’s also used to create partnerships and establish profitable relationships with other webmasters. Link building is a tedious process, but one of the best for getting free (sometimes not), targeted hits from other websites.

Vik Tailor is the owner of http://www.linkexchanged.com and http://www.buyadvertisingonline.com. He has been in the online advertising industry for over 4-5 years and has extensive online marketing knowledge.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Vik_Tailor
http://EzineArticles.com/?Link-Building:-To-Link,-or-Not-to-Link,-That-is-the-Question&id=4619

Gauging Progress is a tough thing to do for a new blog and one of the hardest things for you to do when a blog is only ten days old.  it is even harder to gauge the progress than it is to attract visitors.  None the less you need to do it, just as much as you need to attract new visitors every day.  Let’s take a look at Meme Connection again.

• Since the blog went online we have dropped our Alexa number 3.2M and that is down from 3.5 on Sunday when I checked it last and down from 7.5M on the first.  i think I may well meet the goal I set of under 1M by the end of the month at this rate if I keep it up.
• Google has been good to us as well.  For the unquoted terms meme and connection the site or sites linking to Meme Connection carry nine of the top ten slots.  For a site that went online fifteen days ago that is pretty impressive even if the terms aren’t well searched, since there are 6.5M search results.
• Google Analytics says my visitors thus far are 55% referring traffic, 34% direct traffic, 8% search traffic, and the rest is made up of other and I have no idea what “other” actually constitutes.  I do know however that a large amount of the total traffic comes from sites looking at my profile.  I also know that a large amount of direct traffic is from twitter, or more precisely from the Twhirl client, which registers as direct rather than referring for some reason.  I have seen this happen on other sites using both Google Analytics and other real time metrics programs.

Things I still need to is spend more time commenting on other blogs and putting the name out there.  I need to find new members willing to create or submit memes.  Lastly I need to keep doing more of what I am doing and researching keywords to use in google that will rank well for Google.

For the record contributors who sign up you get a profile with live links and post links.  i do visit every link and those who put up spam crap can expect to find themselves site banned.

I was asked recently how to get a 1000 visitors a day to your blog network.  If you have a network it is quite easy.  The more blogs you have the more content you have, and more content you have the better chance you will get hits from search results.  Here is my quick list of do’s and don’ts.

• Content isn’t enough.  You need content with good keywords and for that material to be indexed.  If you run a wordpress blog the Google XML Sitemap Plugin is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal for getting indexed.  If you want to be properly indexed it is highly important that you use good content specific keywords and tags.  I generate specific keywords with Wordsfinder and use the Calais Tagaroo Plugin to generate Semantic tags, both of which appear as meta keywords to search engines thanks to my theme.
• Write about popular things.  If you follow the first rule of good tagging and and getting regularly indexed, writing about popular topics is going to greatly increase your traffic.  While it goes without saying that writing about football in the off season isn’t going to bring you a lot of traffic for those posts, when I say popular I mean really popular.  The Google Trends page is your friend if you learn to read it correctly.  At any given time these are the 100 most popular search terms on Google and they all have links to recent blog posts through Google Blog links.  Incorporate something from here and your search traffic will go up.  Mention sixty or seventy of them over a couple of relevant posts and you are search gold for as long as the trend continues.
• Write something worth shouting about.  If your posts are pretty good there is always someone willing to submit it to the Social Media outlets.  Promoting yourself is held by some as being tacky and rude, but I don’t think so under some circumstances.  if you aren’t the only one you are promoting.  if you submit, comment, stumble, and rate hundreds of pages a week a little self promotion isn’t a bad thing.  Once a page has been submitted by someone else there is no reason not to jump on the promotion bandwagon.  If you put up a couple of stumble worthy pages a day your traffic can easily exceed a thousand hits a day.
• Comment on popular blogs in your niche.  I can’t begin to tell you how many thousands upon thousands of visitors this can bring to your blog.  This is a long term strategy that has to be cultivated and worked over time.  You need to leave relevant comments on these blogs and do it often.  One good comment will likely get you some traffic, but a hundred comments on a popular blog a year or more is golden.
• Give people a reason to come back.  Unless you are giving your people a reason to come back they likely aren’t going to.  There are lots of good sources of the same information you are providing so you need to give people a reason to return.  I use CommentLuv, KeywordLuv, Nofollow Free, plugins and interact with the people that comment.  Some of my blogs I offer an integrated forum so readers can interact with each other.
• Make it easy for people to come back.  Not only do you need to give people a reason to come back, you need to make it easy for them to return. (I need to do a better job of this on this theme.)  You can do things like put a Del.Icio.us, Technorati,  Yahoo as well as rss feed or many other buttons that make getting back to you easy for people to return.

I was recently had the unfortunate experience of using a one of my local libraries computers to access one of my blogs.  Not only are they still using IE 5.X they have very limited resolution.  Despite 17″ monitors and a couple of 19″ for the really blind folks the resolution was horrible.  They were all stuck at a static 800×600 except for the large monitors for the severely visually impaired which were stuck at 640×480.  While those setting should be an option, they made for pretty horrific view of many sites I took a look at.

My challenge to theme designers is this design a theme or more importantly themes that make use of the theme switcher plugin.  I don’t have all the details worked out yet but there needs to three available sizes of the theme to choose from.  The small size should be readable full screen with 800×600 screen size with important data above the fold. The second size should cover the most prominent 1000pixel width size, but not extend past the edges of a 1024 width.  The last size should make use of wide screen monitors in either the horizontal or vertical.  Figure the resolution of 900×1440 as the widescreen standard.

I don’t know what the prizes are yet either, but if there are any sponsors who want to get in on this let me know.  The contest will begin August 1st.

If you are serious about getting exposure and making some extra adsense cash this is a contest for you.

- Out of My Mouth – http://www.outofmymouth.com -

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